One challenge the Drupal community has faced for some time is a labor shortage. There are, quite simply, not enough skilled Drupal developers to go around. That's quite a problem when the Drupal market is continuing to grow steadily.

One of the challenges to finding good Drupal talent is that Drupal has historically been, well, weird. And by "weird" I mean "entirely unlike any other system on the market". That makes few skills transferrable between Drupal and any other PHP framework, application, or system. Developers trained on Drupal cannot easily transition to any other system and developers trained on any other modern PHP system get lost in arrays the minute they set foot in the door. It's a sufficiently large problem that I've talked to other development shop owners that have said outright they have more success hiring fresh, junior developers and training them on Drupal as their first system than hiring anyone with experience, as those with more extensive PHP experience run for the door.

That's a big problem. Fortunately, that's about to change.

For the past several years, the Drupal project has been working to Get Off the Island. Drupal 8 will be using more standard, common PHP and programming-in-general tools, techniques, and architectures, making it more accessible to more developers than ever before, even non-PHP developers. The number of Drupal developers showing up at non-Drupal events is rising; For example, Lonestar PHP 2013 had two; Lonestar PHP 2014 had 10 (which for a 200 person conference is a very respectable number). I've noticed similar trends at other PHP conferences.

But to really seal the deal and help fill the Drupal employment gap, it's time for Drupal employers to step and do their part: Selling off the island.

With Drupal 8, and the buzz around it in the general PHP community, there will be an increasing number of general PHP developers interested in working with Drupal and who are better qualified to work on Drupal. (Not with no training, but with far less retraining than Drupal 7 requires.) Those developers, though, won't just walk in the door. They have no reason to come to a DrupalCamp, and probably not even a DrupalCon. As a Drupal consultancy or Drupal-based company you need to go out and find them. The core team has done its part, now it's time to do yours.

A friend of mine once said that if you want to meet people with whom you have a shared interest you need to go where people with that interest hang out. That applies for hiring, too. So where does the next round of Drupal talent hang out? At non-Drupal events. If you don't then someone else will hire the next generation of senior developers before you do.

• Have a presence at events: Ensure that your employees aren't just going to Drupal Camps. Make sure that some of them go to general PHP or general Javascript conferences, too. Not only is is good professional development for them (which makes them stronger developers and therefore stronger members of your team) it's good advertising for you. The word-of-mouth impact of knowing one or two smart, friendly people at "that Drupal shop" greatly helps when someone is looking for a new challenge.
• Have a presence on stage: Make no mistake, presenting is hard work. It takes a lot of preparation to give a good talk, and that takes time. But the impact of having someone from your company on-stage is 10x that of having them walking around the hallway with other attendees. If someone from your team can present on work that you've done that's fantastic. But even just presenting on something cool, interesting, insightful, or otherwise useful can be a big help to your company's brand. Also, light branding of the presentation itself is completely OK as long as it's not gratuitous. That's a much more targeted form of marketing than exists anywhere else, online or off; you have a self-selecting group of potential hires in one room together. Let your team be what they're there to see.
• Sponsor: Drupal shops sponsor events all the time. Every DrupalCon and DrupalCamp has a long list of sponsors that help make the event happen and many of those have a physical presence as well with a table or booth. Sure, that is in part to help support the community and it should be commended. But let's be honest, few companies are going to sponsor an event unless they think the marketing value of it is a good return. Clearly, many companies do think it's a good return because they keep doing it. Why should the return be any different at a non-Drupal event? Historically it's been lower because Drupal was so isolated from the rest of the PHP world but that's changing. Sponsoring a general PHP, Javascript, or web developer conference is becoming just as useful a marketing endeavor as sponsoring a Drupal-specific event.

At the start of 2013 I laid out a challenge to Drupal developers: Attend at least two non-Drupal events that year. I'll now lay the same challenge out to Drupal-based companies: Encourage your team to present at at least two non-Drupal events in the next year, and sponsor at least two non-Drupal events in the next year. There's no shortage of them; there's over a dozen PHP conferences just in the USA every year and more around the world.

Your next Drupal hire is going to come from a non-Drupal background, especially a senior-level developer. If you want to hire them before someone else does, get out to where they are. It's a whole new market if you're willing to embrace it.